[lbo-talk] Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world - New Scientist

[Carrol Cox]

On 10/19/2011 11:31 AM, Doug Henwood wrote:
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> On Oct 19, 2011, at 12:20 PM, // ravi wrote:
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>>
>> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500-revealed--the-capitalist-network-that-runs-the-world.html
>>
>>> AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.
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>>> The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.
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>>> The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere. But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).
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> It looks like this analysis runs into the problem that a lot of these analyses do - they list the banks and money managers that hold shares (e.g., Barclays, Capital Group, Goldman, etc.) on behalf of their clients, but not the ultimate owners, the clients, themselves.

Indeed. There was a series of articles in Socialist Revolution abut 40 
years ago started by an article claiming the banks owned the 
corporations with a reply entitled something like: Who owns the 
Corporations: The Capitalists do." (I think it was a better title but 
this is what I remember.)

Carrol